


Tonight

by MillyVeil



Series: Displaced [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alcohol, Bad coping mechanisms, Episode: s03e10 The Return Part 1, Sheppard misses Atlantis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 01:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20183902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillyVeil/pseuds/MillyVeil
Summary: John misses Atlantis. And Rodney.





	Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Continuing my SGA fic dump. Another one from 2007. Originally posted on LJ.

John's eyes are closed. The flicker of the muted TV across the room bleeds through his lids, but it's far away and inconsequential. The metal under his fingers is intimately familiar - all the hard angles, all the little details. The barrel bushing obediently turns and the recoil spring plug releases.  
  
The feel of the Colt changes gradually as he strips it by touch. He's done it three times tonight already, stripped it and put it back together, for no other reason than to keep his hands busy and his mind from going useless places. He removes the slide stop.  
  
His new team is a walking disaster zone. Yes, he knows most of them are new to gate travel, but according to their service records they've all seen combat. Except for Babbit, the exobiologist. He at least has some gate experience. Not that that experience prevented him from wandering off on his own. John forces his fingers to relax around the slide. He's still angry, seven hours later. With himself more than with Babbit, because it was a cold wakeup call, realizing how much he'd come to count on Rodney knowing how to handle himself off-world. He slides the barrel out and opens his eyes to look down at the stripped pistol in his hands.  
  
The mistake of taking that for granted almost cost him a scientist today.  
  
He was maybe harsher than necessary with Babbit back there, but he's not at the SGC to win popularity contests. He's there to keep them all alive as long as he possibly can.  
  
Picking up his glass, he sloshes the amber liquid around with a roll of his wrist. Complex notes of smoke and oak and hinted sweetness hide in the rich smell. It's good stuff. Expensive stuff. Beckett brought it over before he left for two weeks in Scotland. Pegasus had had plenty of alcohol to go around, from both the not so secret stills in the hydroponics labs and the worlds they traded with, but being in command was a 24/7 job and John had had few opportunities to indulge in more than an occasional drink. The beach fest on the mainland had been an exception, and god, to this day he can't even smell that Athosian fruit wine without feeling nauseous.  
  
Not that he's all that likely to smell it ever again.  
  
The whisky burns as it goes down in one sweep. He coughs a little as he starts reassembling the gun again. It's like one of the jigsaw puzzles he liked when he was young; this piece goes here, fits in like so, latches with that, and so on and so on. The boys don't change, as the saying goes, just their toys.  
  
He's almost done when he hears an almost inaudible knock on the door. He glances at his watch and lets his head fall forward with a sigh.  
  
"Go to bed, Rosie," he calls out to the door.  
  
If he opens the door she'll be standing there with too much makeup around her eyes, pulling nervously at her badly bleached hair, and John is too tired to deal with her tonight.  
  
There's something about his strange neighbor that invariably makes him think of Teyla, but he can't figure out what. They're about the same age, the same height, but those are about the only similarities he can come up with. Where Teyla is calm power and strength, Rose is all nervous tension. She hugs the walls in the hallway whenever she passes someone. For some reason John seems to be one of the few people she will even acknowledge. Most others, she simply ignores, her arms crossed in front of her, shoulders up and head down.  
  
John tries his best to be nice to her (she seems like she doesn't get a lot of that) but tonight he just doesn't have the heart to tell her _again_ that the last he’d seen of her scraggly little bag of bones it had been getting its head kicked in by a group of bored kids by the railroad tracks behind the drugstore.  
  
He’d gotten his hands on one of them and taught him a lesson the kid wouldn’t forget anytime soon. But it had been too late for poor Luke. John had helped bury the cat out back later that night. It had been raining and afterwards Rose had made hot cocoa for him in her kitchen and talked about her mother. But for some reason Rose doesn't always remember things right - or at all - and she keeps asking about Luke. When John has to tell her as gently as he knows how that her Luke is gone, she just stares at him with horrified eyes. Then her face crumples a little and she starts to cry.  
  
John feels like a coward when he ignores the second timid knock on the door and finishes reassembling the gun.  
  
Eventually, Rose gives up. John can hear her walk slowly down the hallway. Resting his finger on the trigger guard, he sighs and lifts the pistol, aiming it straight ahead. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feel of the trigger when he squeezes it. It feels right. No strange, unfamiliar hitches or flatness in the motion.  
  
He puts the gun aside, next to the magazine and pours another drink. With a button push on the remote, the TV dies and the room falls into darkness. He watched the outlines of the three large cardboard boxes stacked along the wall. Tomorrow, he thinks for the thousandth time. Tomorrow.  
  
The glass is soon empty and John fills up again. And again. He's well on his way to drunk and he doesn't care. He's got the day off tomorrow and he's planning on spending most of it in bed, anyway. He slides down onto his side and lies down on the couch. The pillow from his bed is manhandles into shape under his head and he reaches for the cell phone that has been staring silently at him from the table all night. He has two numbers on speed dial. Domino's Pizza is one of them. John doesn't quite how it happens, but suddenly he's listening to signal after signal going through. It rings six times before the call is directed to voice mail.  
  
'Leave a message,' is the curt, no-nonsense instruction John's getting increasingly often these days.  
  
He already planned it out in his head as he listened to the signals: a snappy, sarcastic message telling Rodney to answer his damn phone from time to time and how he's probably creating messes in Area 51 just to get the daily quota of panic he got used to in Atlantis.  
  
But in the silence after the beep, John's words revolt.  
  
_I miss you_, they want to say.  
  
He cuts them off before they get anywhere. He's drunk, but not _that_ drunk.  
  
_I hate it here_, his head offers as compromise. A little better, but still pathetic.  
  
_I miss our city_.  
  
God yes, he does. Not the part where they have to fight for their lives, or the Wraith part, or the replicator part, but he does miss the city. And the jumpers. And doors you could open with your mind. And having a driving range with an ocean view sure beats staring at concrete and bedrock for hours on end.  
  
_How are thing on your end, McKay? Equally miserable?_  
  
He drapes his arm over his eyes. "I'm thinking of going out to Vegas," he finally says, no introduction. "You want to come? I was thinking we could go back to that place--"  
  
The second beep marks the end of John's allotted message time.  
  
A distant siren wails to life somewhere in the city. The muted sound of a newscast bleeds through the walls. John keeps the cell phone pressed hard against his ear, the dead line humming softly.  
  
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *  
  
Gray daylight has started to displace the darkness when the nausea wakes him. He barely makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.  
  
The room spins lazily and he feels cold to the bitter bone. The tiles are hard under his knees as he repositions himself and leans his head against the edge of the toilet seat.  
  
God. He's dying. He's sure of it.  
  
He stays very still, allowing a few more minutes to make sure he's not dying or going to throw up again before he struggles to his feet. He washes his face in the coldest water his tap can provide. Rinsing the bitter-sour taste from his mouth, he catches his own eyes looking back at him from the mirror. He looks sick. Bloodshot eyes, pale, unshaven. Dark circles under his eyes. He looks away and scoops another mouthful of water to his lips.  
  
On his way back to the couch, he ignores the shattered bottle and the broken pieces of his cell phone that are lying by the far wall. The heavy blanket he usually keeps on the couch has slid down to the floor at some point during the night, and he grabs it and curls up under it, shivering.

Sleep comes like a sledgehammer, despite the lingering roiling of his stomach, and John mercifully doesn't dream.

~ The End ~


End file.
